Why do people cage the things they love the most?

The last few days I've been playing with making cages. One of them failed quite a lot - Lauren thought it was a Jellyfish - but I sewed some words on it which I quite liked...

 
It did get better after that, I made one that actually looked cage-like which is always an improvement. It would have to be a bit bigger for the bird to actually fit in it though...

Then, today, our lovely sewing technician lent me a book that told me a proper way of making cages and it worked quite well. It might've worked better if I'd used the wire when I was supposed to and my wire is a bit flimsy but it's still pretty nifty :)

 I think this is the cage I'm gonna use in my final product, I'll have to re size it cos it's quite big at the min but I'm still quite proud of it. It took sooooo long to make though 
 
#lion #myna bird #cage #what's the use of wings #wire #calico #water soluble

Lion

Had a fun day making this little lion. he does need some more deail on his face and I have forgotten to give him a tail and ears but apart from that I think it's not too bad. Bit of fur for the mane instead of Calico and there's a real life Simba :)

#lion #prototype #calico #simba #fabric

Myna Bird

I've had a fun week or so with my Myna bird-ing. Remember the wing I drew, first off I decided to make it out of paper...

(wing inside - the bit you can see from the front)

(wing outside - the bit you see from the back)

When I'd done that I decided I could move onto fabric stuff so I had a play and failed a bit...

I finally managed to get it right!

Now I just need to play with making it look like it has feathers and more like an actual bird and it's done lol

#mynabird #calico #drawing #prototype #wing #whats the use of wings

Samples (that have gone right)

Well, I've finally sorted the sample fiasco - spent all yesterday in college printing and painting and what not and this is the result...

This one is various colours on cotton sateen

...on cotton sateen again

Same but on silk

and calico

I was so scared when I washed them incase they bled everywhere again but I had remembered to mix the colours into a paste this time so it wasn't going to. Phew!

While I was waiting for them to finish in the steamer I had a bit of a play with some other prints I'd done on calico...

They're to put your wigs in :p

Bags

As this part of the project is an embellished bag today we made some prototypes! I was rather over excited about mine as they actually worked and it gave me a bit of a break from drawing flowers - there are quite a few in my sketchbook so I'll put one or two of the best ones up here for you to see.

First we made a tote bag, complete with lining and handles...

 Then we made a drawstring bag, complete with ribbon...

These were just to get us used to making bags, ours can be different shapes and sizes but with this same basic style. Think I'm going to do a tote bag but then I get all confused with how much I could do to it, I spent about half an hour thinking about lining it - I could do it in silk with some painted bits on to look like flowers, or just a plain coloured silk, but what if it rips, maybe I should use a cotton... and so on and so forth all night :)

Applique and whatnots :)

We've been doing some applique which was quite fun but also quite stressful when we were doing reverse and shadow applique and I had to cut stuff away, aaah! I was so worried that I was going to cut through my stitching when I was doing that.

The first pic is normal applique and reverse applique, and the second pic is shadow applique. I really liked that one cos I used a sparkly silver thread and it looks all Christmassy! It doesn't really look it in the pic but it makes me smile :)

We also had a play with dyes. The top row are calico samples that I dyed and the bottom are silks that I dyed. Believe it or not but the corresponding samples have actually been dyed the same colours...

And, I found a nice new stitch - the cloud stitch, oooh...

Machine Stitches

We started our Embellished Surfaces project today and I got to play with free motion stitches on the machines, I was quite excited!

This is just a free motion stitch on Calico using an embriodery hoop. I quite like how sketchy it looks as I was copying from a drawing.

This one is machine couching - you use embroidery thread at the bottom so you have to mess with the tension - and it makes this lovely raised, wrapped effect.

Finally, we have normal free motion stitches but this time in colour. This has been sewn with Stitch and Tear behind it so the Calico doesn't pucker. I decided to leave some areas just with the veins sewn in so the detail wasn't lost and I think this is my fave piece from today :)